There’s lots of talk recently about the wealth of Jeff Bezos. There are maps comparing his wealth to entire countries, a “You are Jeff Bezos” game where you can spend his money on different things - like paying their fair-share of taxes, and a graphic that puts his wealth in perspective. A recurring point is that most people simply cannot fathom the amount of money he has. The number is $150 billion. My favorite attempt to bring the number into human terms is Quartz’s article, “The average US worker would need 10 times the length of all human history to earn as much as Jeff Bezos”. This beautifully captures the point that someone does not simply earn or work for such an amount of money, but rather captures it. We, at degrowth.info, thought a similar calculation would be interesting. We wanted to know how many humble (but hopefully useful) projects like ours Jeff Bezos’ wealth could pay for. In case you haven’t heard already, degrowth.info is improving its site to better support the degrowth community and improve the usability of the platform – this will cost 7,500€.
The crises provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic have revealed for all what many have long known: the foundations of the wealth and well-being of the world rest upon the sphere of social reproduction and the labor of care. This work is performed primarily by women and, more generally, by people whose work and lives are under-valued and marginalized by sexist, racist, classist, homophobic and ableis...
If making the degrowth case was like baking a cake, disproving the plausibility of green growth would be the equivalent of turning the oven on. Decoupling is only “a myth” or “a fantasy,” some would say, a notorious fallacy that requires as much attention as the confabulations of Flat Earthers. And yet, faith in decoupling is strengthening in environmental agendas all around the world, includin...
In the past year, we have launched a survey worldwide for mapping degrowth realities in the world. 114 organisations answered to the call, with nearly 3,000 active people engaged, mostly located in Europe but also in North and South America, Philippines, Tunisia, Turkey, etc. On August 20th 2018, some members from each of them met for the first time in Freetown Christiania (Copenhagen, Denm...
